About Me

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

get your frame-on

The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don’t say, well I read a science fiction novel that tells me it’s not a problem. If the crib’s on fire, you don’t speculate that the baby is flame-retardant. You take action. The planet has a fever.

I will leave the nitpicking of the testimony to the eggheads over at ScienceBlogs,* but that's how you frame, yo: he connects planet with baby - we take care of babies, and even more importantly we love babies - and the proper care of babies with an interested, learned party - doctors, so we make the connect doctor, or pediatrician, someone trained to care for babies with fevers, with scientists.

He then reiterates the doctor's interest and expertise - "If the doctor says you need to intervene" - to take care of the baby - "you don't say, well, I read a sceince fiction novel that tells me it's not a problem." What parent - yeah, aside from those parents - would use, and notice the language here - a science fictionnovel in lieu of a doctor's recommendations?

It's not accusatory in it's tone or construction. It says, you care about the planet like you would a member of your family, one that needs your attention. And as a good family member, you're going to take steps to provide that care. Beautiful.

* ScienceBlogs, God bless 'em, seem to reduce a lot of their frustrations with politics and science or people and scientific concepts generally to, "Well, my undergrad students can/know/understand [fill in sciencey thing here], why can't people/The President/blah blah?" Well, a) probably for the very same reasons not all of us can tell a joke or that I'm a total math retard, and b)one of Lakoff's great findings has been that facts aren't frames, and it may surprise some of the bloggers over there, but a cursory glance at Google News pretty much indicates people don't always conceive/perceive the world based on, um, facts (So thanks for that, George Lakoff, no matter what the cognitive linguistic snobs and New Republic writers might say).